The Jasmine Keeps a Corpse
or why the oldest trick in desire began with a flower pretending to be a corpse.
Somewhere this summer, in a glasshouse in a city near yours, a crowd is putting on good clothes to go and smell a corpse. They will stand in line for hours. They will lift their children toward it and hold their phones up and stream the stench to strangers, and the institution will keep its doors open through the night, because the thing they have come for only performs after dark. It is a flower. Amorphophallus titanum, the titan arum, throws up the largest bloom on earth, taller than the man photographing it, the flushed grey and red of meat gone over, and it warms its own central spike to blood heat and waits for the middle of the night to open the valve all the way. What comes off it then is not a perfume. It is cadaverine and indole and the trisulfides of a body on its third day in the sun, the exact chord a real carcass strikes, aimed with great precision at the flesh flies and carrion beetles who lay their young in the dead. The flies obey. They crawl the false body hunting for the meat that was advertised, find none, and leave dusted with pollen, cheated and useful in one motion. And of everything under that glass, the orchids, the lilies, the whole catalogue of things that smell the way we are assured a flower ought to, the corpse flower draws the biggest crowd by a distance nothing else comes near. We queue, in our good clothes, to be lied to by a plant doing an impression of death, and we call the whole event wonder, and we are not wrong to.
You would never do such a thing, you are thinking, you would never line up for a corpse. Your body disagrees, and it has already gone over your head tonight to prove it. When flesh comes apart, bacteria take it down one building block at a time, and two of those demolitions, the amino acid ornithine into a compound called putrescine and lysine into one called cadaverine, throw off the flat, unperfumed reek everyone knows on sight and no one was ever taught, the smell of the three-day dead. In 2015 two researchers named Wisman and Shrira put a whisper of putrescine under people’s noses, a dose so faint that afterward not one subject could say they had smelled anything at all, and then they watched. The people went still and watchful. They edged away from the spot a little faster than they had come to it. They leaned, with no notion whatever that they were leaning, toward flight, and toward a fight if the flight were closed off. We are each of us walking around with a private alarm wired straight to the smell of our own ending, ringing below the floor of hearing, asking no one’s leave to ring. The crowd in the glasshouse is only the part of us that thought to buy a ticket.
That wire is the one the flower has learned to play. It does not trouble to invent a fresh signal to draw you in; it borrows the one already run to every nerve you own, the one marked danger, and it turns the volume down until the alarm arrives as allure. Dread and wanting come into the body along the same line. The entire art, the plant’s and then ours, is knowing precisely how far to turn it down.
Because turned down far enough, the very same molecules stop screaming and begin, instead, to flirt. Indole, which the titan arum vents by the lungful into the midnight air, is manufactured all day long by wholly ordinary bacteria inside your own gut, which take tryptophan, the amino acid you swallow in every mouthful of meat, and crack it into the compound most answerable for the character of what you leave behind you in the morning. This is not a slur on the flower. It is the same molecule, ring for ring, atom for atom; the only thing that differs between the perfume and the filth is how much of it there is. Pressed down to a part in a thousand, the stink of the outhouse turns cleanly over and becomes the smell of a white flower opening in the dark, and something close to two and a half percent of all that makes jasmine smell like jasmine is exactly, precisely this. Its blunter brother skatole, which a German physician drew out of human waste in 1877 and named without a flinch from the Greek word for dung, rides just beneath it; and skatole, the dung-thing, at a few parts in a billion is dripped on purpose into strawberry ice cream to make the cone taste more like a child believes childhood tasted. I have never once trusted a scent that smells only of soap, and it has taken me until now to hear what my distrust was smelling: an absence. Strip these molecules out to build a thing that gives no offense and what you are left with is a jasmine gone flat and soapy and correct and dead, a flower with the current cut off at the wall. Such a flower can certainly be made. It has never yet made anyone cross a room. The scents that ever moved me to cross one were not clean; there was always, low beneath the sweetness, a note I could not have named without embarrassment, and it was that note and never the sweetness laid over it that closed the distance.
None of which we thought of. The flower did, and not by a margin: something on the order of a hundred million years before there was a nose to try it on, back when the earliest beetle preferred a carcass to a blossom and some plant, pressed to compete for that beetle, quietly agreed to be both things at once. Every poet who ever set the rose against the rot, every perfumer who called his finest work dirty and meant it as the highest word in his vocabulary, every one of us who has ever wanted a thing more, and not less, on learning what it was made of, is saying a sentence the flowering plants finished before we owned the mouths to try it. The titan arum says that sentence once a year, at the top of its lungs, to a multitude with its phones out. The rest of the time the identical sentence is spoken very quietly, on warm skin, by people who have learned in their own bodies what the plant worked out in its chemistry: that a trace of the grave, carried on purpose, is the oldest and steadiest way there has ever been to be crossed a room for.
So here, to end, is the quiet one. A small white flower, cut before dawn because after dawn it closes its account, tens of thousands of blossoms wrung down to a single gram of the material a perfumer reaches for when a scent has to manage the one thing a scent can do that a face cannot. A drop of it, warmed at the wrist, carried out into an evening. What lifts off that wrist, at something near two and a half percent, is the very note the corpse flower screams into the dark to bring the flies in off the wind, only here it is said under the breath, folded nearly to nothing, kept. Across the room, someone has not yet decided whether to come over. The flower has done the whole of its part. It always does. The rest of the distance was never the flower’s to close.
Elías Delgado
Sources:
Amorphophallus titanum (titan arum / corpse flower): the largest unbranched inflorescence; carrion mimicry (sapromyiophily) via cadaverine, indole, trimethylamine and dimethyl di/tri/tetrasulfide, the same compounds released by actual decomposition; flesh-colored spadix warmed to about 37 C (blood heat), stench peaking in the middle of the night, aimed at carrion beetles and flesh flies; drawing more visitors than any other species in botanical collections, with public livestreams of recent blooms: “Chemical mimicry in the corpse flower: Floral odor and phytochemical profiles of Amorphophallus titanum,” ScienceDirect, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305197824001388 ; Chemistry World, “Scientists uncover the chemistry of the corpse flower’s potent stench,” https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/scientists-uncover-the-chemistry-of-the-corpse-flowers-potent-stench/4020563.article ; Wikipedia, “Amorphophallus titanum,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphophallus_titanum ; Wikipedia, “Carrion flower,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrion_flower
Putrescine (from ornithine) and cadaverine (from lysine), formed by bacterial decarboxylation, the principal diamines of decomposing flesh: American Chemical Society, “Putrescine and Cadaverine,” https://www.acs.org/molecule-of-the-week/archive/p/putrescine.html ; “Cadaverine and Putrescine in Foods, Bacteria, and Decomposition,” https://biologyinsights.com/cadaverine-and-putrescine-in-foods-bacteria-and-decomposition/
Putrescine, at concentrations subjects could not consciously detect, eliciting vigilance and flight (then fight when escape is blocked): A. Wisman and I. Shrira, “The smell of death: evidence that putrescine elicits threat management mechanisms,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015), article 1274, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01274/full ; University of Kent news summary, https://www.kent.ac.uk/news/society/7327/the-smell-of-death-can-trigger-fight-or-flight-in-humans
Indole produced from L-tryptophan by bacterial tryptophanase (to indole, pyruvate, ammonia), a major metabolite behind fecal odor, and the concentration-dependent flip from fecal/animalic to floral/jasmine on dilution; roughly 2.5% of jasmine absolute, with the de-indolized white floral reading flat and lifeless: “Fermentative Indole Production via Bacterial Tryptophan Synthase,” PMC9100643, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9100643/ ; Fragrantica, “Indole” raw-materials note, https://www.fragrantica.com/notes/Indole-528.html ; Perfume Shrine, “Indole & Jasmine: Indolic vs. Non-Indolic or Dirty vs. Clean,” https://perfumeshrine.blogspot.com/2010/05/jasmine-indolic-vs-non-indolic.html
Skatole (3-methylindole): isolated from human feces in 1877 by Ludwig Brieger, named from Greek skatos (dung); floral at low concentration and present in white florals; used at micro-dose as a flavor enhancer in some ice cream: Wikipedia, “Skatole,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skatole ; American Council on Science and Health, “Skatole, a Natural Monstrosity in Perfume, Parliaments, Produce and Poop,” https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/01/21/skatole-natural-monstrosity-perfume-parliaments-produce-and-poop-14520